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The Tempest in the Ivory Tower

In 1937, H. L. Mencken offered some advice to the son of the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. ''My guess is you'd have more fun at Yale than at Princeton, but my real choice is Harvard,'' he wrote. ''I don't think Harvard is a better university than the other two, but it seems that Americans set a higher value on its A.B. If I had a son I'd take him to Cambridge and chain him to the campus pump to remain there until he had acquired a sound Harvard accent. It's worth money in this great free Republic.''

And so it is. No university occupies a more central place in the American imagination than Harvard. In ''The Sound and the Fury,'' the Compson family sells an inheritance of pastureland to send their son Quentin north to Harvard. His experience there, albeit fictional, does not become the stuff of university promotional materials. Bedeviled by a Southern past at odds with the secure respectability that Harvard promises to confer, Quentin cracks up and drowns himself in the Charles River. ''Harvard my Harvard boy Harvard harvard,'' he daydreams at one point. Repeated over and over, the word is reduced to syllables, those syllables to nothing.

Harvard, boy, Harvard. What is Harvard? That question has come to the fore more than ever during the tumultuous presidency of Lawrence H. Summers. A brilliant economist who took office in 2001, Summers has become known for his brutally direct leadership style. As one joke circulating has it, he opens his mouth only to change feet. His latest stumble came in January. In off-the-cuff remarks at a conference on women in the sciences, Summers said he wouldn't rule out the possibility that innate gender differences might help explain why there aren't more women in the hard sciences. Offered tentatively, his comments set off a fierce debate, at Harvard and beyond. Summers apologized to the faculty and vowed to ''temper'' his ''words and actions.'' But that wasn't enough for members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, who passed a no-confidence vote in Summers at a faculty meeting on March 15 - the Ides of March. Taken by secret ballot, the vote was largely symbolic and did not include professional school faculty members. Nevertheless, it was believed to be the first in the university's history, and it sent a strong message of discontent. (The Harvard trustees have showed no sign of lessening their support for Summers, but at press time his fate remained uncertain.)

The science comments weren't Summers's first misstep. Early in his tenure, he had a notoriously testy exchange with one of the stars of the university's Afro-American studies department, Cornel West, who quit and went to Princeton after Summers questioned his gravitas. Other incidents followed, which highlighted Summers's seeming disregard for diplomacy and alienated many on Harvard's faculty. To some, however, the outrage was also a sign of trouble in academia - which, as the critic Stephen Metcalf recently observed in Slate, ''has devolved into a series of now highly routinized acts of flattery, so carefully attended to that one out-of-place word is enough to fracture dozens of egos.''

But these altercations, though heated, are skirmishes in a much larger battle developing at Harvard and beyond. In some ways, it recalls the campus turmoil of the 1960's. Only this time around, the protesters aren't the undergraduates; they're the faculty, who to some extent remain immersed in the values and pieties of the 60's and are clashing with a president intent on bringing Harvard in line with today's political and economic realities. What's happening at Harvard goes far beyond Summers's personality; instead, it's about larger social and political transformations to which the academy - essentially a conservative institution made up of thousands of progressive minds - is deeply resistant.

Much of this is mapped out in Richard Bradley's ''Harvard Rules'' (HarperCollins, $25.95), a timely new book that sets out to catalog the flaws of Larry Summers. Well-paced and juicy, it nevertheless relies heavily on innuendo and on other people's reporting, since Summers wouldn't grant an interview to Bradley, a former editor at George magazine. Even so, ''Harvard Rules'' manages to shed much light on the current situation. In Bradley's view, Summers's mission has been ''to purge Harvard of the bonds that kept it from realizing its enormous potential and seeing itself in a new way - his new way. And that meant eradicating the influence of the 1960's.''

In some respects, Summers was a canny choice for the presidency. In his teaching days, he was the youngest professor ever given tenure at Harvard, at age 28, and was widely considered Nobel Prize material. He is a liberal, but of a particular kind. A former chief economist of the World Bank, Summers succeeded Robert Rubin as treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and was a leading proponent of globalization when many other liberals were lamenting its discontents. Summers also hews to a kind of bottom-line market-driven thinking, which can seem deeply at odds with the humanistic values of the academy. And he is unapologetic about American power on a campus steeped in post-Vietnam ambivalence about such things.

In Cambridge, all this made Summers ''an unabashedly mainstream figure in a highly progressive culture,'' as James Traub wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 2003. Yet Summers's politics and his brashness made him appealing to the Harvard trustees, who were seeking a president to pursue a mandate all but guaranteed to win enemies. Harvard, whose endowment stands at a staggering $22.6 billion, had launched plans for a massive expansion. Spurred in part by Cambridge's restrictive zoning, in the 1990's Harvard bought some 200 acres in Allston, an area of Boston across the Charles River from Cambridge.

Still in the planning phases, the expansion has been a hornet's nest of complication, from negotiating town-gown tensions to determining which departments would be relocated. This has been especially problematic because of the university's decentralized structure, in which each of Harvard's professional schools and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences raise their own money and control their own budgets. Autonomy means power. As Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller report in their excellent ''Making Harvard Modern'' (Oxford, 2001), when Summers's predecessor, Neil Rudenstine, sounded out the law school in 1999 about possibly moving to Allston, they voted not even to consider it. The ''deferential'' Rudenstine, as Bradley depicts him, didn't push the matter. Summers, however, was appointed because of his willingness to ruffle feathers, with the understanding he would centralize power and guide the expansion forward. While Summers would certainly be better served if he secured the faculty's blessing, in practice, he doesn't need it. And so the frustrated faculty now finds itself sidelined in a crucial debate about its own future.

Against this background, the resentment over Summers's comments about women becomes clearer. His remarks may have been misguided, but what is the point of a university if not to provide a forum for airing controversial ideas? Summers's comments seemed to mark a return to an earlier era in the gender debate - and so did the intensity of the response. In fact, today, the definition of feminism is open to interpretation. Now, a woman with an advanced degree can leave the workplace to become a stay-at-home mom and still be a feminist; she might even watch ''Desperate Housewives.'' In the broader culture, if not on campuses, the era of political correctness is decidedly over.

But if P.C. is over, what comes next? There's no easy tag line for ''the oughts,'' because there's no immediately recognizable constellation of values. At moments like this, fraught with ironies and ambivalences, it's a relief to find villains. Yet the animosity is not just toward Summers himself, but also toward his stated intent to steer Harvard closer to the mainstream.

His presidency, which began in October 2001, has overlapped with one of the most unsettling times this nation has faced, and he has viewed that as an opportunity to redress what he has called the ''post-Vietnam cleavage between coastal elites and certain mainstream values.'' He vocally supported bringing R.O.T.C. back to Harvard from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where it had been exiled after Vietnam-era campus protests and where it remained because of later protests over the military's discrimination against homosexuals. And he supported Harvard's honoring the Solomon Amendment, which ties federal funding to universities' allowing military recruitment on campus, something students and faculty had protested. In this way, as Bradley writes, ''Summers explicitly linked the future of the United States in its fight against terrorism with the success of Harvard.''

In another effort to address the global situation, Summers delivered a speech on campus in September 2002 in which he criticized a campaign calling on Harvard and other universities to divest from Israel. ''Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent,'' he said. As his detractors saw it, ''Summers had crafted his talk not to promote debate, but to silence it,'' Bradley writes. In any case, Summers had sent a clear message, one other university presidents have been notably loath to communicate even as ugly anti-Israel sentiment in the guise of leftist open-mindedness has rippled across their campuses.

It's not altogether surprising, then, that Bradley's book includes descriptions of Summers that echo familiar characterizations of President Bush. Summers ''is not an intellectual, because intellectuals know the power of doubt,'' a professor and signer of the divestment petition tells Bradley. In Bradley's view, that's only one of his shortcomings. Among many cartoonish characterizations in ''Harvard Rules,'' he dwells on Summers's table manners and often disheveled appearance. Beyond that he emphasizes that Summers happens to be the first Jewish president of Harvard, and notes that that might inform his views on Israel and foreign policy. He also speculates about New Republic editors ''whispering'' in Summers's ear.

All this aside, Summers and the faculty have also differed over the nature and importance of a liberal arts education. With the rallying cry that students should know the difference between a gene and a chromosome and focus more on concrete knowledge and less on ''ways of knowing,'' Summers ambitiously decided to reform Harvard's curriculum. But his method worried many in the university. In the most convincing chapter in ''Harvard Rules,'' Bradley recounts how a report on the curriculum was delegated to administrators who commanded little authority and were perceived by some as puppets of Summers. What is more, Summers urged the evaluators to complete their analysis in less than a year, a remarkably short time compared with Harvard's earlier curricular reviews. Harvard's last major curriculum reform, in the 70's, capped years of careful study and produced the Core Curriculum, in which students are required to take courses in set subject areas, including sciences, literature and arts, historical studies, foreign cultures, and quantitative reasoning.

In the end, a report published in April 2003 set a series of ambitious yet vague goals, including replacing the Core Curriculum with distribution requirements and putting a greater emphasis on ''interdisciplinary courses.'' One of its most striking recommendations, however, was that Harvard should ''develop distinctive course materials for use in, and potentially beyond, Harvard College,'' Bradley writes. The implication was that ''at some point, Larry Summers wanted to market those courses to students around the world, to use the Harvard brand name to teach 'foundational knowledge' to students whether they went to Harvard College or not,'' Bradley adds. This, he says, is a way ''to further stamp Harvard's imprint on the world's education; to promote an empire of the mind.'' And that inextricably identifies Summers with the broader, more vexed debate about the role America should hold among the nations. Indeed, the animosity toward Summers is also implicitly that of an academic culture, steeped for decades in questioning authority, that has awakened to find itself an imperial power.

In all the recent turmoil, one Harvard constituency has been strangely marginalized: its undergraduates. They are the focus of another new book, ''Privilege'' (Hyperion, $24.95), a memoir by Ross Gregory Douthat, a self-important young conservative vexed by the discrepancies between the Harvard of his dreams and the Harvard of reality. Douthat, class of 2002, devotes far too many pages to his undergraduate romantic woes. Nevertheless, he paints a vivid portrait of campus life. Douthat is disappointed by the Core Curriculum and finds its offerings ''maddeningly specific and often defiantly obscure.'' In Douthat's account, few Harvard courses seem particularly worthy of export on the international market.

Douthat, now a reporter-researcher at The Atlantic Monthly, was once employed to write SparkNotes, the cheat sheets students use to write term papers without doing the reading. He depicts his fellow Harvard undergraduates as essentially corner-cutting careerists, busy trying to score the right summer internships that will land them choice post-college gigs in Washington or New York. ''The ambitions of the undergraduates are those of a well-trained meritocratic elite, brought up to believe that their worth is contingent on the level of wealth and power and personal achievement they attain,'' he writes. ''The pursuit of these goals, in turn, depends on high grades in a way it did not for an earlier generation.'' Hence, the oft-heard cry, ''Look, I can't afford a B in this class if I want to get into law school.'' And hence Summers's efforts to crack down on grade inflation at Harvard, where in 2001 about 90 percent of students graduated with honors, compared with 50 percent at Yale that year.

Patrician Harvard is long gone. The 60's are over, too. As Douthat notes, a Harvard undergraduate weekly founded in the 70's with the title What Is to Be Done?, after Lenin's Bolshevist pamphlet, is now named Fifteen Minutes. ''The change to a Warhol-inspired title says everything about the difference between that generation and mine,'' he observes. The shift may also signal a return to an earlier elite model, only today's elite are the children of the middle class, groomed on SAT prep courses and the right extracurriculars. A Harvard degree today, no less than in Mencken's day, is worth money in this great free Republic. Now, however, the exigencies of the meritocracy require it to come with a high grade point average.

Sensitive to economic disparities, Summers has abolished tuition - $27,448 this academic year, not including room and board, which bring the total to $42,450 - for students whose families have annual household incomes below $40,000. Yale and Princeton have made similar moves. Bradley, however, sees this as public relations as much as genuine reform, since such families had paid only $1,000 a year before. Yet what about families who earn more than $40,000 a year but still can't pay for their children's education without significant sacrifice? At Harvard and elsewhere, the cost of college is eroding the idea of a liberal arts education in favor of a pre-professional one. Time will tell whether Summers's presidency will hasten that change.

In ''Harvard Rules,'' Bradley describes the case of Joe Green, an undergraduate disillusioned by his experience as a student representative on the committee evaluating the Core Curriculum. ''Green kept thinking about a question one of his professors had put to him: 'If you could either go here and get no diploma, or not go here and get the diploma, what would you do?' '' Bradley writes. ''It bothered Green that he couldn't easily answer the question.'' It should bother the president of Harvard, too. The answer, in the end, is the difference between a great university and a brand name.

Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.

Correction: March 27, 2005, Sunday:

An essay on Page 12 of the Book Review today about Harvard and its current difficulties refers incorrectly to Princeton's financial aid program for students from less affluent families. Beginning in 2001, that university eliminated loans to students who meet criteria for need, substituting grants that need not be repaid. Unlike Harvard, Princeton has not eliminated tuition fees for such students and has not established a specified level of family income to determine eligibility.

Correction: April 10, 2005, Sunday:

An essay in the Book Review on March 27 about Harvard's current difficulties misstated the date of Lawrence H. Summers's appointment as the university's president. It was July 1, 2001, not in October (when his ceremonial installation took place). The essay also misstated the date of a report on curriculum reform at Harvard; it was April 2004, not 2003.